Blood on Lake Louisa Page 16

  “Yes, that’s clear enough. But what about a larger gun —a 10 gauge for example?”

  “No good. Neither are the smaller ones—a 16, nor a 20 gauge. Look. Dope it out yourself. There are only a few buckshot shells on the market.” He took a pencil from his pocket and wrote on the white plaster wall:

  I studied the figures he had written. Then after a pause: “You mean there is only one buckshot shell on the market for a 10, 16, and 20 gauge gun, and four for a twelve?”

  “Correct.”

  “And that, since two shots were fired, whatever shells were used, there should be twice the number of holes in the wall as there are pellets in each shell.”

  He wrinkled his forehead. “Not only that, but no two different sizes add up to nineteen—wait.” He was gone, to return dragging his burlap bag through the hall. “Don’t forget the windows.” A big ax was produced from the sack. With lusty strokes he began to chop a large hole in the plaster wall, near the floor and directly beneath the shot holes. When he had demolished a section of the wall about two feet square, he struck a match and looked in the opening. He felt around inside at the floor level.

  “Rotten luck, Doc. They used some short flooring here. I’m still looking for the shot. If any were left they’re under the house. Come on out. I want to see under this place anyhow.”

  “But the stone foundation. You—”

  “I came prepared for it. There’s a pickax, a crowbar, and a sledge hammer in the sack.”

  It took us half an hour to make a breach in the mortared stones that would admit Marvin. I offered to go, and breathed a sigh of relief when he assured me that it was his idea and his party. He wriggled through, and I passed him a lantern which he had fastened to the outside of the bag with a piece of string run through the burlap. He lit it, warned me again to keep a sharp lookout, and disappeared from my view.

  I spent a fidgety ten minutes, which seemed like hours, leaning against the house and clutching the gun in my pocket with a sweaty hand. He was reeking with self-laudation when he reappeared.

  “So you found them?”

  “Two. That’s plenty. Double-0’s.” He stood up and brushed the sand off his knees. “There’s nothing under there but dirt. I want to have a look through that back window where the shots were fired.” I followed him around the corner of the house. The broken pane in the sash was about five feet from the ground. Marvin was carrying the ax. He placed it to his shoulder like a gun and squinted along its length into the room. Then he moved slowly from side to side covering the whole of the interior with his imaginary weapon.

  “You take it, Doc. You’re a better shot than I am. See what you make of it. It looks more like whoever shot from here was trying to kill Ed Brown in the entrance to the room. If he’d aimed at you—by the chair there—the shot would have hit in the opposite corner of the room. Try it.”

  I took his place. It was obvious that Marvin was right. If I had stayed by the chair when the shots were fired they would not have touched me. At least that is the way it looked to me, aiming with an ax handle through that broken window. I know better now. I know, if Ed had left me by that chair when the gun was fired, I would have been riddled with buckshot. That was one of the things that puzzled Marvin so. The other thing was the number of shot holes in the wall. He solved them both at the same time. But it was too late then. The waters of Lake Louisa were dyed deep red with blood.

  25

  It was dusk when we crossed the lake on our way home. We pulled the boat up on shore, and I started to dismantle it. Marvin stopped me.

  “Help me hide it in the bushes.”

  “You’re going to leave it here?”

  “I’m coming back early in the morning. I prefer the bad road to the long row.”

  “Haven’t you had enough of that place?”

  “Too much. But I sidetracked myself this afternoon. I came out to find Simmons’ old distillery. I’m not going to quit until I do.” We hauled the boat into a thick clump of palmettos, and put the tool sack into it.

  “What time had we better leave?” I asked.

  I could not see his face, but I heard his chuckle. “So the old sleuth can’t stay away from the trail either?”

  “Stay away!” I stormed. “Wild horses couldn’t drag me out here on my own. It’s only the sight of a silly dolt like you sticking his chucklehead into something alone. I’ll come and take care of you for Celia. You and your ‘shoot on sight!’”

  “Thanks,” he said soberly. “Put it any way you want it. You’re still one hundred per cent. We’ll leave town at seven in the morning.”

  Neither of us attempted to talk as we thumped and jounced over the sand trail. The headlights pointed alternately at the black sky and down into the white sand. I watched them with a fascination which acted as a narcotic to my discomfort. My mind was busy with the events of the afternoon, and troubled with what the morning might bring. Bodily relief from the jolting brought me back to the car. The road had flattened out. I gazed at the two faint black lines we were following into the darkness beyond. They were grass grown and dim, and totally unfamiliar. Then I knew that Marvin had no idea where we were going.

  I kept my mouth shut, the best—and hardest—thing to do under the circumstances. Sand roads spider-web every mile of the Florida woods. Their signposts are fallen trees, old logs, swamps and lakes, and a mediumistic knowledge of their peculiar habits. Trails of the logger and the hunter, they lead everywhere, and just as surely nowhere. It takes skill to drive them in the daytime; sure knowledge at night. The motorist who hesitates in the darkness at one of their thousand forks is lost. The most familiar landmarks perversely become unrecognizable in the glare of electric lamps. In the vast wilderness of Gulf Hammock one night, I drove for five hours with a woodsman who had lived there all his life. We were trying to find his farmhouse. When we came upon it from the back, both of us failed to recognize it. He stopped the car at his own home to inquire where we were.

  Marvin drove on. The black ruts changed to white. Stunted oaks pressed in close on each side of us, scraping the paint and banging noisily on the fenders. I closed the windows beside me to keep their branches from snapping in my face. The road dropped down. The white ruts changed to black again. We were running into low wet ground. There was danger we would be bogged. Marvin stopped.

  “Where do you think we are?” he asked.

  “I think we must have taken a fork way back there that’s leading us around the lake. This looks like the shore near the Cow Pasture. If it is we can’t keep on going. Can you turn around?”

  “I’ll try. Get out and see that I don’t back into anything.” We were closer to Lake Louisa than either of us realized. As the car backed up the lights swung out over the thick bed of lily pads and grass in the southern end. Marvin made the turn. I got back in.

  “Did you see the boat?” He was driving fast.

  “Just now? No. I was back of the car. Where was—”

  “It was hidden from the lake in the tall grass. The lights lit it up as I turned. There were two men in it, but I don’t know either of them. It’s unhealthy around here. The man in the bow had a rifle.”

  “Did you recognize the boat?”

  “I couldn’t make it out. Too close to the water.”

  We missed the scenic railway on the return trip. Instead we came out on the hard road about three miles from Langley’s farm where we had taken to the woods in the afternoon. Clearly, we had found, quite by accident, a much better road to the south end of Louisa. The sound of the hard shell crunching under the tires was extremely soothing to my ears as we sped toward town. I had been listening for a rifle shot ever since Marvin spoke of the two men in the boat. I grew talkative with the relief. He did not seem anxious to give me any information about the pellets of shot he had found. I brought it up myself.

  “I’ve been thinking about those buckshot. You said they were double-0’s—”

  “I’ve been thinking about them just as much as yo
u have. Two shells of double-0 buck should leave twenty-four holes—not nineteen.”

  “Then five of them—”

  “Are missing. Do you remember how much of the wall in the hall you could see when you were sighting through the window?”

  “Two or three feet. Not more.”

  “I went all over that wall this afternoon. There’s not a sign in the hall that any shot hit there. From the way the holes are scattered it looks like the weapon was a sawed-off gun. I tried to figure on ricochets—off a plaster wall. That’s good! I even went over the hall door. To hit that from the window would take a gun with a rubber barrel that could shoot around corners. It’s too deep for me.”

  “It must have been an old muzzle loader with an odd charge of shot. Either that, or they disappeared into thin air.” My companion drove steadily on without a sign that my fatuous remark had given him his first real insight into the truth.

  Mae had saved us supper. We bolted it down like a couple of pigs, too hungry to talk. Mae and Celia were both kept busy replenishing plates. Neither of them had been worried at our lateness in returning home. My wife knew my proclivities for fishing until it was too dark to throw a bait. She had assured the younger girl that it was useless to worry about fishermen, or hunters, until they had been missing a week. I knew, however, that if she dreamed we were in any danger, our trip in the morning would upset her terribly. It was up to me to make it appear that there was no hazard in Marvin’s free-lance detective work.

  “I didn’t get much fishing today,” I complained, when we had settled down to coffee and cigarettes in the living room. “Your boy friend has turned into a treasure hunter, Celia.”

  “What’s he into now, Doctor?”

  “He’s discovered that Simmons was a moonshiner years ago. This afternoon he dragged me out to the lake to fish. I found when we got there he had brought shovels instead of fishing tackle. Now he wants me to go back in the morning, and dig up the whole place trying to find some decent licker.”

  “It’s not quite that bad.” Marvin smiled. “I would like to find where Simmons stored his stuff back in ninety-nine.” He went on to explain why he considered his search so important. Taking his tone from me, however, he failed to mention the tag we found on the boat. The dead dog and the missing buckshot he also passed over. He concluded by saying: “My principal reason for keeping after this business is to clear myself. It’s true Pete has made an arrest. But that hasn’t cleared me from the shotgun Ed found. And it hasn’t explained how that boat got under my house yesterday afternoon.”

  We were very tired from our trip. The conversation lagged. Celia turned on the radio, and I dozed through a half-hour program from WMBF. At its close Marvin rose with a badly stifled yawn. “We both better get some sleep, Doc. I’d like to get out there early in the morning.” Celia saw him to his car. I heard from him later in the evening with a message that robbed me of an hour’s badly needed rest.

  Mae and I went upstairs. I slipped into my bathrobe, and went into her room after I had undressed. She was reading. I sat down on the bed beside her to smoke a good-night cigarette. She placed her hand tenderly over mine on the coverlet. “You’ll be very careful out there tomorrow, won’t you Will?”

  I laughed in a way I intended to be reassuring. “Careful of what?”

  “The dissembling you and Marvin did tonight may have fooled Celia. I’m not asking you to let Marvin go alone in the morning. All I’m asking you to do is to be careful—very careful.”

  “I certainly will, dear. But there’s nothing to worry about—”

  “Oh, don’t say that, Will! Marvin Lee knows something. He’s not running around blindly digging. Why hasn’t he been to the Sheriff’s office to help him make the search you are making? Why is he keeping everything so close to himself? Why doesn’t he think Bartlett is guilty, with all the evidence Pete has collected against him?”

  “I haven’t been able to answer those questions myself, Mae. I won’t take any chances—“ I kissed her goodnight. She clung close to me, loath to let me go.

  At two in the morning Marvin called me on the phone. Half asleep I heard him ask: “Where can we borrow a bird dog?”

  “A bird dog?” I repeated stupidly.

  “A pointer, or a setter. Or a fox hound if you can’t get a bird dog. We have to have a dog in the morning— early.”

  “We might get Buddy Nixon’s pointer, but we can’t hunt now.”

  “Wake up, Doc. This is important. We can hunt what those two other dogs hunted—”

  “What two other dogs?”

  “The dead ones, Mitchell’s and Nixon’s. They found what I’m looking for. We’ll stop by Buddy’s in the morning—”

  “Wait.” I was wide awake by then. “What put that idea into your head?”

  “The only thing that could have, Doc,—the pump on the sink in the Simmons house kitchen. Good-night.”

  26

  I lay awake for an hour after Marvin’s phone call. Step by step, with the ephemeral clarity of late wakefulness, the events of the past ten days paraded themselves before me. It was hard to realize that it was only ten days. It seemed more like weeks, or even years. I switched on the reading light beside my bed, and jotted down my part in the affair on a prescription pad.

  The discovery of Celia’s father, and the bad night that followed; the search for the banker’s watch in Forman Spence’s store; the harrowing trip to Tiger Creek, following Cass Rhodes’ bobbing lantern through the swamp; the tragic discovery at the end of the journey; my narrow escape in the Simmons house, and in my own room; (I glanced nervously at the door when I wrote this to see that it was really closed.) my part in the Salmon inquest, with my unwitting implication of Cass Rhodes; our lunch in the Southern Hotel, and the theft of the Miami Floridians from the Sheriff’s safe; Abe Nixon’s strange death, and his stranger last words; the arrest of Harry Bartlett; and the, to my mind, conclusive evidence of the previous afternoon, that, in some way, Tim Reig was mixed up in the whole ugly business.

  The cigarette I had lit was finished. I put it out in the ashtray beside my bed, and read over the list again. With the implication of Tim Reig things began to fit together. He had been in Crossley’s office the morning the papers were stolen. His long delicate fingers were better fitted to manipulate a stubborn combination than those on any other pair of hands in Orange Crest. On the list of suspects I had drawn up the day before, I had already marked down the possibility of his connection with the counterfeit money.

  There were two people in the house the night I was attacked. Why not Reig and Harry Bartlett? Bartlett had lied about Reig’s whereabouts on the day Mitchell was killed. What object could he have had in that if not to protect an accomplice in his crimes? The whole thing began to look very simple. Bartlett, through some former connection in the jewelry business, had probably known Reig long before. He had interested the staid watchmaker in counterfeiting as an end to making easy money. The taciturn David Mitchell had crossed the trail of the gang with whom Spence’s employees were connected. Bartlett had been assigned to the job of seeing that the banker created no trouble. Tipped off by Tim Reig that there was a vacancy in Forman’s store, he had secured it to keep a closer watch on Mitchell. The rest was simple!

  I reached over and shut off the light with a disgusted snap. Simple, except for the fact that I was leaving at six o’clock in the morning to hunt for something that had to do with a pump in the kitchen of the Simmons house, and that Marvin expected a bird dog to do the finding. Simple, but for the fact that I had spent the whole previous afternoon with my nerves as taut as banjo strings and a cocked pistol in my hand. Simple, except for the fact that some unknown person had shot at me with a gun with five vanishing buckshot. Extremely simple. When less than six hours before Marvin had seen two strangers in a rowboat carefully concealed in the tall grass of the Cow Pasture, one of them tenderly nursing a rifle on his knees.

  Booted, and khaki clothed, I was waiting at the gate when M
arvin arrived in the morning. I had brought my shotgun. Bird dogs are more inclined to romp, than hunt, unless they are followed by a man who looks like he means business. Mindful of Mae’s warning, I had strapped on the revolver which had been so little use to me the last time I reached for it on the closet shelf. I was rather shamefaced when I greeted Marvin. I felt overburdened with armaments.

  At the first sight of my fellow hunter for the day, I knew that I was not the only one whose nerves were badly mangled. His face was pinched and gray from lack of sleep. All my professional instinct rose up in me at the sight of a man driving himself to the breaking point. As it happened, I was in no position to chide him for it. I probably looked as badly as he did.

  I put the gun down in the back of the car. It was early morning, and we were apt to pass some farmers on their way into town. I was willing and anxious to help my companion, but I did not want to build up a reputation for hunting out of season. I knew that the Nixons were going to think that I was doing just that, but they, at least, would keep it to themselves and not bruit it all over the country.

  “What’s all this about the pump?” I asked, without preliminary, as soon as we were well on our way. “And the dogs? You ruined my night’s rest, and I’ve had enough mystery to last me for a lifetime.”

  He paused before answering, then: “I’d rather not say, Doc, if you don’t mind. I told you my idea about the dogs. The pump looked good to me in the middle of the night. It may not work out so well in the daylight.” He held up one hand restrainingly as I uttered an exclamation of disgust. “I really have a reason. Honestly. I’m not just trying to be irritating and mysterious. I want somebody with me who is not looking for anything. Just watching a dog. You see? Someone who has no idea of what they’re hunting for. You’ve done some hunting, and I haven’t. You’re much better able to tell when a dog’s acting peculiarly in the woods. The hiding place I’m trying to find is cleverly concealed. There’s no doubt of that. The Sheriff’s office has hunted the ground over twice—and uncovered exactly nothing.”